The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa is one of 20 top U.S. academic institutions selected to take part in a prestigious, $20.3 million, five-year program to train researchers in global health.

The Fogarty International Center and its partners within the National Institutes of Health announced that the 2012 Fogarty Global Health Program for Fellows and Scholars will fund mentored research opportunities in 27 developing nations.

Institutions selected include top-tier research universities at Stanford, Yale, Duke, and Johns Hopkins. The announcement noted that the chosen institutions, including UH Mānoa, “have demonstrated the capacity to provide outstanding mentored global health research education and, in fact, already have robust training in developing nations.”

Dr. Vivek R. Nerurkar of the UH Mānoa John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) will lead the program in Hawaiʻi. “We will be working with research mentors throughout the UHM, identifying candidates who may apply to take part in training that begins this August at NIH,” said Nerurkar, Chair of JABSOM’s Department of Tropical Medicine, Medical Microbiology and Pharmacology. “We are excited about the new partnerships this opportunity provides for us to build on our knowledge of infectious diseases which is of particular importance here in Hawaiʻi, the center of so much international travel.”

Nerurkar noted China and Thailand, the two Pacific-region nations chosen to host the trainees, are already the sites of JABSOM health research partnerships. “We have collaborated on research into HIV/AIDS in Thailand, and our Office of Public Health Studies has an exchange program with Schools of Public Health in China’s Wuhan and Fudan universities,” said Nerurkar.

Nerurkar said the mentoring opportunity benefits more than just the selected researchers. “They will make relationships with top scientists in those nations, and learn cutting-edge techniques, which they can bring back to Hawaiʻi to build upon."

The Fogarty program will be divided into five consortiums, or partnerships, of institutions. UH Mānoa will work most closely with the University of Washington, the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota. The institutions within the consortium including Hawaiʻi will together receive about $3.8 million over the five-year period. Nerurkar expects two scientists per year will be chosen from Hawaiʻi. Application deadline is May 14, 2012.

The other consortiums are headed by the University of California, Berkeley (Florida International, Stanford, and Yale); the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Johns Hopkins, Morehouse and Tulane); Vanderbilt University, Nashville (Cornell, Duke and Emory); and the University of California Global Health Institute, (UC Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Davis).